Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts

By Alyce Wilson

Some of our wedding gifts

This past weekend, The Gryphon and I finally got around to putting away the bulk of our wedding presents. We were spurred by the fact that our landlord had e-mailed last week to notify me he was coming through this Thursday with a township official for the annual health inspection.

While the sort of things they look for are not a problem, I still like to make sure the house is especially neat and clean.

We'd had boxes sitting in the corner of the living room ever since the wedding, and while we'd unpacked a few things, most of our gifts were stacked there until we could decide where to put them. I was getting tired of living that way.

I took some before and after pictures to test my Honeywell Pentax Spotmatic to see if I was right about the source for the strange prints I'd just received. Turns out I was, and the pictures came back just fine.

We'd bought a new shelving unit at IKEA after the wedding, which until this point was simply filled with a number of wedding gifts, still in their boxes.

Also from IKEA, we'd bought a cart with wheels that we hoped would expand our counter space and give us extra storage for pots and pans, which we definitely needed now that we had more.

On Sunday, we drove to The Container Store in the Cherry Hill, New Jersey, mall to find something to place Una's dog food in. I'd been using a regular plastic storage bin, which was placed between the stove and the wall. Since that's where we wanted to put the wheeled cart, we needed to find something tall and narrow that could fit between the refrigerator and the wall.

In this photo, you can just barely see the top corner of the plastic storage bin, which is blue and in the bottom center of the photo, to the right of the coolers.

After searching through the store, we found a tall plastic bin which fits a 20-pound bag perfectly. That freed up the space next to the stove for us to place the wheeled cart.

Looking through The Container Store, I found they have a lot of organizers for office spaces. I may need to go back there, once I decide what I might need for my office. That's a project, though, for another day.

We did some work on Sunday and spent a lot of time on Monday, while The Gryphon was home for Martin Luther King Day, unpacking boxes and discussing where things should go. As we did, we considered both functionality and aesthetics, with good results.

Adding the wheeled cart allowed us to move our cooking sprays and oils, plus some seasonings and mixing bowls, off the counter space right by the sink. That will give us more space, both for food preparation or for doing dishes. We also stored most of the new pots and pans on its shelves.

We were so successful that all we have left are two sets of Corell Ware plates. If we decide to replace what's already in the cupboard with those plates, we'll use some plate storage containers we got as a gift to store the old plates. We'll get to the plates another day.

Already, we've started using some of the new items. The Gryphon cooked dinner on Monday using some of the new pans, which are from the Emeril line. He loves them. At dinner, we also used two of our new wine glasses.

The task generated a lot of empty cardboard boxes, and it took me more than an hour yesterday to break them all down and load them into the car to take them to the recycling center.

Because things were mostly put away, I could finally sweep and mop the floors properly, which I haven't been able to do since October. Even if we didn't have health inspectors coming, it makes it feel better to have our house cleaner and more organized.

Plus, as one of my new year's resolutions was to get our place more organized, I feel like we're making good progress.

Copyright 2008 by Alyce Wilson

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